There are an increasing number of whiskeys coming from small distillers. At first, a small number of distillers bottled unaged distillate as a somewhat hokey packaging of moonshine-like white lightning; some were flavored, some were spiced, but almost all of them were meant for mixing (maybe a more accurate description would be ‘spiking’). But over the past eighteen months, a new interest in white whiskey has led to a batch of more carefully made, more flavorful bottlings — or maybe it was the other way around, it’s hard to tell which caused which. Even the big distillers like Heaven Hill and Buffalo Trace got into the act, and some folks were buying white whiskey to custom age in small barrels. 2011 was the Year of White Whiskey.